The disclosure relates to methods and apparatus for monitoring, storing, and analyzing patient medication usage data and compliance patterns involving use of a sample testing device, associating compliance patterns with medication properties data and patient history data, and for determining a correlation between medication compliance patterns and other data.
Medications may include potent chemical and/or biological elements designed to induce a specific ameliorative effect on a patient's disease state or medical condition. Medication manufacturers, prescribing physicians, and caretakers have limited information about a given medication that typically includes only basic guidelines for safely and effectively prescribing very powerful substances to patients.
This dearth of information is especially significant with regard to the effects of medication treatment regimen compliance. Medication manufacturers, prescribing physicians and other caretakers struggle to effectively manage the effects on patients of non-compliant medication intake or compliance patterns. For example, without data regarding patient medication usage, caregivers face difficulty discerning whether negative effects of medication intake are the result of precise, over, or under compliance by the patient, or a prescribed treatment regimen that is ineffective or unsafe. There are few or no independent objective measures of a patient's actual compliance with a prescribed treatment regimen, aside from the patients' memory about their own historical medication compliance over time. Further, there are few or no independent objective measures of negative or ameliorative effects attributable to varying degrees of over and/or under compliance with treatment regimens.
Poor or unexpected medication treatment regimen compliance is a medical problem that poses risks to patient health and potentially increases health care costs. By way of example, a patient who has undergone an organ transplant may be prescribed a regimen of immunosuppressive medications to protect the patient's transplanted organ from being rejected by the patient's immune system. If a patient takes too much or too little of these medications, or takes them at incorrect time intervals, then the patient's body may experience a cascade of biochemical reactions that may result in the transplanted organ being rejected or other diseases being acquired, or other complications.
For example, if a patient takes too much of an immunosuppressive medication, even intermittently, the patient's inherent immunological capability may be adversely affected, thereby rendering the patient susceptible to malignancies, bacterial infections and viral infections. The complications of an over-suppressed immune system can lead to death, severe illness that requires hospitalization, and can compromise the transplanted organ. The medical intervention often expended to redress such adverse consequences can add significant direct and indirect financial costs for the patient and the health care system, in addition to potentially limiting the patient's quality of life.